In the great expanses of the Grand Staircase-Escalante national monument, the silence hits you first. Minutes pass, smooth and unbroken as glass. The smallest sound – a breath of wind, a falling rock – can seem as loud as passing traffic.

Colter Hoyt knows this landscape well. As an outdoor guide, he walks the monument almost daily. Yet these days he is full of fear. This remote paradise of red rocks, slot canyons and towering plateaus faces an uncertain future, following a controversial presidential proclamation that removed 800,000 acres from the monument and opened land up for potential energy development.

Colter Hoyt, an outdoors guide and conservationist, at Grand Staircase-Escalante. Photograph: Charlotte Simmonds for the Guardian

When Trump took office in 2016, he promised the energy industry a new era of “American energy dominance”. This would only be possible by exploiting America’s 640m acres of public land: mountains, deserts, forests and sites of Native American history that cover more than a quarter of the country.

The US government has the discretion to decide what use a parcel of public land should be put towards, such as conservation, energy development or grazing. Under Trump, environmental advocates fear a shift to the extreme: land offered indiscriminately for mining and drilling, with disregard for other potential uses.

Two years after Trump came to power, a new study produced by the Wilderness Society, a not-for-profit organization advocating for the protection of public lands, and shared exclusively with the Guardian, reveals the full extent of his government’s efforts.

Key findings include:

13.6m acres onshore have been made available for leasing by the Trump administration, far more than in any two-year period under the Obama administration.

More than 153m acres of ecologically sensitive habitats – from the California desert to the Arctic national wildlife refuge – have seen conservation protections rolled back in some form.

More than 280m acres have been made available for offshore leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and along nearly 90% of the US coastline.

For Hoyt, the prospect of mining on formerly protected lands is a scenario almost too painful to contemplate. On a recent August afternoon, as temperatures climbed to 95F, he bumped and shuddered down a winding road at the wheel of his expedition vehicle. His destination: a lookout point, from which the Circle Cliffs, an almost incomprehensibly vast segment removed from the monument, could be viewed. Motoring through the auburn hills, he became visibly emotional.

“This is where the mining trucks would be driving in and out.”

The Guardian profiledthree affected communities in the American west – in the Utah desert, the southern Rockies, and valleys of western Colorado – to see three different responses to this shift toward energy development.

The lost monument: the future of Grand Staircase-Escalante

Many longtime cattle ranchers in the area had been upset by Clinton’s move, fearing their cattle would be kicked off grazing lands. “It felt like a pretty big disrespect to us,” explains Link Chynoweth, 57, a fourth-generation rancher and alfalfa farmer. He and other ranchers welcomed Trump’s rollbacks.

The monument is an archeological, paleontological and environmental wonder, and its special new status brought change: tourists, new businesses and outdoor enthusiasts searching for a slice of frontier magic. While that has benefited some, it has left many others feeling ostracized.

Al Gore with Bill Clinton as he signs a bill designating the Grand Staircase-Escalante national monument in 1996. Photograph: Doug Mills/AP

“I’ve been here all my life,” says Chynoweth. “So when environmentalists say we have to make this a monument because they have to protect it, I’m saying: ‘Who do you have to protect it from? Me?’ The message I’m getting is: if we don’t protect it, you guys will ruin it.”

While cattle grazing on the monument remains a point of contention, it’s the energy industry that has environmentalists most concerned. A section removed from the monument known as the Kaiparowits Plateau sits on top of an enormous coal reserve – albeit one that may be too remote to develop. Meanwhile, a Canadian mining firm has boasted of its acquisition of the Colt Mesa, a former copper mine on land once circumscribed by the monument.

Link Chynoweth on his farm in Escalante. Photograph: Charlotte Simmonds for the Guardian

In a recent draft management proposal for the monument and the now-excluded land around it, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) expressed a preference for a plan that would be the “least restrictive to energy and mineral development”.

At auction land can be leased for as little as $2 an acre, but that doesn’t mean it always gets bought. Leases can also be purchased by companies simply to increase their asset portfolio, with no plans to develop it. The result is land being offered without a guarantee it will translate into more energy or other returns on investment for the American taxpayer.

For Nicole Croft, the executive director of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, the benefits of the monument are now at risk. “The monument has brought diversity,” she says. “It’s brought opportunities. It put this place on the map.”

Ricki Brown, who came here more than 20 years ago, was one of the first to put the new tourist economy to the test. He built guest houses that now rent out to visitors from around the world, who enjoy sweeping views of flat-topped mesas and desert shrubs. “Basically everybody has jumped on the tourist wagon,” he says, “whereas we used to be the only ones doing it.”

Blake Spalding, a Buddhist chef, opened her restaurant, Hell’s Backbone Grill, in 2000 – and has watched business flourish. “We now do in a month what we used to do in a whole year,” she says on a warm evening over a green salad and a glass of red wine.

As hikers and adventure seekers file in to fill their stomachs, she insists “tourism has brought opportunities galore” beyond the food business. “You can start a guiding business. We need electricians, carpenters and janitors, too. The notion that we need an extractive industry is a lie.”

To mine or not to mine: Colorado’s North Fork Valley faces a choice

The closure of two key mine sites in 2013 and 2016, Elk Creek and Bowie #2, saw hundreds of coalminers laid off. Vineyards and cherry orchards now span the green valley floor, blossoming under the shadow of nearby mountains and sitting side by side with the former mines.

When the BLM put 8,000 acres on the table for leasing in its December auction, it pushed people to decide what future they really wanted: bring back the energy industry, or embrace the new agricultural economy.